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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.

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I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.

I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.

It may be a minority, but you're not alone.

I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL was just ahead of its time.

Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.

Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.

> until AI and the bots ruined it all

Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.

But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.

This is the root cause. "AI and Bots" are just two of the many symptoms

With every passing day I basically think this is going to be the future of the internet. Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.

It's largely already happening in places like Discord.

I think the first company that can capture what Discord has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is going to do really well.

Discord could probably become the new internet if they introduced a URN scheme and permitted folks to host web pages.

Guess what tools would be used the most to write content for those web pages.

Discord is becoming a bloated slop fest. It has literally been implicated at times for bad gaming performance [1]. Remember when it used to just be a chat app? And don't get me started on its "quests" system, which may burst your ideal internet bubble. [2]

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/discord-throttles-nvidia-g...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/discord-is-making-a-maj...

>Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.

And eventually someone is going to come up with a search engine for Discord, and the cycle will start all over.

i think the problem with revamping Q-Link/AOL into the be-all end-all for everyone (thats human) youre gonna hafta pump the prime with AI chatbots to give the appearance of lots of people to draw you in, kinda like how reddit admins pumped the prime by making tons of posts early on. just a little light treason.

All it would take is a not phone friendly internet. Just a slight barrier to entry changes the dynamics quite a bit.

I don't think it works today. You have walled communities in Discord and messaging apps, but if you are looking also for the degree of anarchy in those days, today we know that your everyday person can make money off the internet but you didn't know that then, and I think that colors a lot of the experience.

> where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me.

It's great to read these words. People are starting to get it. The Internet is not for you, it's against you.

"The internet" isn't for or against anything, it's just a vast computer network. It's the humans with an agenda that exploit the internet (specifically the web) that are against you.

You're correct of course leptons, but do please give credence to important shorthand. As I've put it before, the Internet is the battleground. Ground is not necessarily "neutral". It favours certain forces and tactics. See the "Nine Situations" [0] We used to occupy type-5 (open ground) which was also mostly type-2 (dispersive). We are now on "serious" and "difficult" ground. Therefore the environment itself is hostile. Most of what people commonly think of as "The Internet" - that's not your friend any more.

[0] https://suntzusaid.com/book/11

If you replace "the internet" with "web browsers", you would be correct. "The internet" doesn't care what bits and bytes travel through it, nor who uses it.

Maybe if you've time for a long but very interesting read have a look at this [0]. R. Berjon gives a good explanation of why the internet (and we mean IP routing, DNS, BGP and ISP governance etc) is far from a level system and what needs to be done to restore it to public service as a global tool for the good of humanity.

[0] https://berjon.com/public-interest-internet/

It still exists. Currently it looks like Patreons and their associated communities, long-running web forums, small chatrooms on platforms like Discord or Facebook or Instagram, and so on. Small communities, with relatively high barriers to entry.

That's not the same Internet.

Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.

With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).

Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.

Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.

Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.

Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.

Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.

One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.

(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)

That's a pretty narrow view. My Internet in the 90s and early 2000s was on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Network, Yahoo! Mail and phpBB web forums hosted by random people with pictures hosted on PhotoBucket. Plenty centralized.

The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the time. The difference is the size of the community, and the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.

I have no reason to doubt your experience.

But AOL IM and MSN were centralized walled gardens that came rather late to the game, and neither PhotoBucket nor phpBB existed at all in the 20th century that is the context here.

> Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.

Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.

I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.

Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.

Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".

It's crazy to me that custom sprays existed at all in any capacity for so long. They were novel and sometimes funny but man, I really don't miss the days at all of playing a game and having your roommate/family ask why your computer screen is plastered with goatse or meatspin or the like. I remember more than a handful of awkward conversations trying to explain WHY that wasn't actually part of the game itself.

All of this still exists today though. It hasn't disappeared, it has only been drowned.

If you want to find it again, change your search engine. Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there. Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC servers still exist, forums still exist, independent emails still exist.

Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to fall for, start doing and living what you want

Shout out to lemmy as well. Still missing some users to seriously challenge reddit, but also lacks all the spam and astroturfing.

the problem with that is not the payment, it's that you will only be sharing it with people similarly willing to pay for a walled garden. I'm guessing most of what we're nostalgic for was created by people who wouldn't be up for that

It was created by people that

1. could afford a computer back then and saw the utility of owning one. 2. had access to the internet, so either in college, a 'tech' company, or ties to some local collective that provided access.

When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.

> When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.

And that's what made it fun I guess

> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century.

I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience of pre-Internet era.

Internet is lead of our time.

Would you pay a nominal amount (like 5 cents or 25 cents) to consume one piece of good, ad-free content, assuming that there was no login, no account, no friction, etc? You click, you read, and 5 cents is magically transferred from you to the writer?

I would. But I've asked a lot of people who say "no, I don't want to pay when I can read it for free. I don't mind the ads that much."

> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.

Sadly, they won't know what they were missing. It'll be the new normal

Some asshole tech apologist is probably getting ready to post that section from Plato where Socrates complains about writing any minute now.

Of course, that asshole is oblivious to the fact that most if not all of us probably just don't understand what Socrates was missing, so he's just showing his ignorance and stupidity.

> I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.

The problem is that, even if you try to do that, the incentives are probably still aligned against you, just maybe less blatantly.

Just look at how many formerly ad-free paid services are adding ads, and how hardware users literally own acts against their interests by pushing ads in their faces (e.g. smart TVs).

The guy who runs the walled garden will always be tempted to get some extra cash by adding ad revenue to your subscription feed, or cut costs by replacing human curated stuff with AI slop (maybe cleaned up a bit).

Isn't it worse knowing what was lost instead of never knowing how good things actually were?

> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.

I did, and...well, let's be careful how we look back at it.

Punch the monkey? Ad supported 'free' internet that literally put an adbar at the top of your browser at all times? Dreadfully slow loads of someone's animated construction sign GIF? Waiting for dial up to connect after 20 tries? Tracking super pixels? Java web applets? Flash? Watching your favorite ISP implode or get bought up? To say nothing of the pre-Google search results (I miss the categories though).

I have plenty of good memories from those days, but it still had plenty of problems. And it wasn't exactly a bastion of research material either unless you really went digging or paid for access.

I only just put it together but Peter Watt's Rifters series is some epic earth grimdark hard-sci-fi, the first taking place as practically horror, confined deep under water.

But my point is, the latter books have this has amazing post-internet, just a ravaged chaotic Wildlands filled with rabid programs & wild viruses. Packets staggering half intact across the virtualscape, hit by digital storms. Our internet isn't quite so amazing, but I see the relationship more subtly with where we have gone, with so so so many generated sites happy to regurgitate information poorly at you or to sell you a slant quietly. Bereft of real sites, real traffic. Watts is a master writer. Maelstrom.

First book Starfish is free. https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm

Thanks for the recommendation and free link!

Another book on my reading list!

> It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.

User facing ability to whitelist and blacklist websites in search results, ability to set weights for websites you want to see higher in search results.

Spamlists for search results, so even if you don't have knowledge/experience to do it yourself, you can still protect them from spam.

It's recreation of e-mail situation, not because it's good, but because www is getting even worse than e-mail.

A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is involved but some sane display technology instead.

Without most of what makes the internet useful, sadly.

I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like the regular internet would go away... when you want useful, go there.

I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available.

But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.

Start here: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I'm already treating the WWW and the commercial internet generally as "Babylon". You have to use it for a lot of stuff (doing commerce, interacting with the government), but why would you willingly use it on your own time?

No way. What you are describing is Gemini, but even more niche - a place which is explicitly walled-off from the "big net", which only nostalgic people with right technical skills and a desire to jump some hoops can get to.

This is not going to work - as time progresses, there will be less and less nostalgic people who are willing to put up with that complexity. And "non-commercial" part will ensure that there _never_ be an option to say: "I am tired of fixing my homeserver once again, I am going to put up my site to (github|sourceforge|$1 hosting) and forget about it".

Compare to early web. First thing that came to my mind was Bowden's Hobby Circuits site [0]. It's designed for advanced beginners - simple projects, nice explanations. And there are no hoops to jump through - I've personally sent the links to it to many people via forums, private emails, and so on. It apparently went down in 2023, but while it was still up, I remember regularly finding it from google searches and via links from other pages.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220429084959/http://www.bowden...

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